The Other Side of the Glass
by Estenyn the Brave-ish
Summary: Feliciano dreams of a second reality just past his reflection, sees glimpses of people who look strangely familiar, and tries to warn his friends and family. Not even his brother, Lovino, believes him. By the time everyone realizes Feliciano was telling the truth, it's too late, and he's been brought through to the other side of the glass. One question remains. Can they save him?
1. Prologue

Author's Note:

This is my first ever story! Woohoo! I'll try to update it regularly, hopefully at least once a week. Most chapters will be longer than this, this is simply the prologue, boring exposition pieces and all. I'm still learning how to use this system, so there may be a few kinks I haven't noticed. I will attempt to correct them as soon as possible!

Please be gentle, as I haven't ever shared something I've written before. I would love to hear that I'm doing a good job though XD Feel free to leave a review! If anyone has some tips on how to format these, that would be fantastic.

Happy reading! -E

* * *

Run. Run. Run. Run! RUN!

 _RUN!_

Harsh breathing. Panicked crying. Horrors lurking in every shadow, fears come alive, night terrors stalking closer. Never ending halls and eternal abysses, ropes to tie your own noose. Spinning rooms and shattered doors. Nowhere is safe. Not even the other side of the glass.

The bells are tolling, tolling, tolling. Time is running out. Bong, bong, bong, bong, heralding the coming of hell. Flee the bells, flee the hell, escape the endless endless endless screams, the ancient ancient ancient beasts, the shadows that move and the hanging figures. Escape the cage, the awful awful cage, the power that looms and the ground that swallowed your mind before it ate your body too.

Don't turn around. Don't look back. If they don't know you've seen them, they won't hurt you. If they don't know that you know they exist, they won't touch you. If they don't know you know what they are, you're safe - until the bell tolls again.

Keep running. Never stop running. Get away. Get away. Get away!

 _RUN!_

* * *

Feliciano snapped awake. He was gasping and panting like he had run a million miles in the few hours he had been asleep. Sweat dripped down his tan skinned, half naked form, which trembled slightly in fear of what he had just seen in memories and nightmares. He buried his face in his shaking hands, trying to breathe, to calm down, to remember that it was all in his mind like Lovino always said whenever Feliciano came into his room during the night after one of those night terrors.

But were these really dreams? Feliciano had never thought so. They were too real to be figments or phantasms. These were real, dangerous and tangible. They chased him down even in the day now, visions of the world past his reflection taunting him into terror.

Feliciano's shoulders trembled. He released a tiny, pained moan, slowly raising his legs and knees to press them into his chest. He could hear them, even now. Running. Always running, their footsteps pounding into his head - no, inside his head. Running, sobbing, begging for just one moment more - dying, too, last wails of fear and pain echoing into his mind and out of his ears. Feliciano stifled a wail of his own. Running footsteps came from all around him now, echoing into the room and out of the room and through the walls and banging against the edges of the place.

Feliciano screamed softly in terror and curled up tighter and tighter, trying to crush himself into a small lump of once-human.

"No." He moaned. "Please, no, I don't want to, I don't like this anymore, it's not a dream, it's a living nightmare, and I want to wake up!"

"Feliciano!"

Someone shouted for him, a deeper voice with worry and fear in it. Warm, strong arms wrapped around the trembling, gasping form of the auburn-haired young man. Words were murmured in a language both people knew, the familiar scent of sunlight and herbs soothing Feliciano as much as the whispered comforts.

"L-Lovino!"

Lovino was Feliciano's brother, who was the elder by two years. He was the one trying to keep Feliciano safe from the horrid night terrors that had begun to plague his brother ever since they had moved into their new house. Feliciano rambled on and on about his dreams, stories of a nightmare just past their reflection in every mirror in their home. He couldn't stand to see Feliciano like this, but there was nothing he could do. Nothing, that is, save hold his baby brother and try to dry his tears.

"I'm here. I'm here."

Was it enough to help him get through the crying, or was it enough to try to keep him happy? Could he be doing anything more? Lovino wondered every time he woke to Feliciano's panicked, horrible sobbing and harsh, gasping breaths. It reminded him of his brother's asthma attacks in more than one way, and he disliked thinking about those rare yet frightening events.

"Make them go away."

Lovino felt his heart cracking once again. Feliciano's childlike pleas for help always hurt him to hear, but he knew he couldn't do as his brother asked.

"I will."

Feliciano sniffled, settling down and trying to go back to sleep while his brother was still there, while someone was watching his back. Lovino rubbed Feliciano's shoulder gently. A few moments later, Feliciano was once again asleep, hopefully for the rest of the night.

Lovino released a long, deep sigh and got out of the bed, trudging back to his own room. As he passed a mirror in the hall, he stopped, blinking at it. For a moment, he thought he had seen… No, it couldn't be. It was only Feliciano's bad dreams and his own exhaustion tricking his eyes, that was all. Lovino shook his head and let the door to his own bedroom fall shut with a satisfying click, as a man with blond hair giggled in the mirror, unseen by any in the house.


	2. Flash in the Glass

'The thing that most people don't understand is the flashes in the glass. The little strange glimpses of people who aren't people. People who aren't in the room. The flashes in the glass of strangers and nightmares and daydreams. The idea that people truly see these apparitions is, of course, preposterous. These glimpses are merely a combination of paranoia, overactive imagination, and the placebo effect.'

Lovino sighed in relief and sat back in his squishy, well-used library chair. A stack of books on hallucinations, insanity, and superstitions was precariously perched on the table in front of him. He set the book he had been looking through down, still open to that page.

"So that's it, then. Feli's just imagining all of it." Lovino said to himself. "Hell, I thought he was going nuts!" He chuckled a bit and skimmed the rest of the page. Then he stopped to reread a paragraph.

'Sometimes, however, these phantom images are thought to be more than just an illusion. Some people believe that certain places are weak spots where our dimension touches another, parallel universe, and that the people in the glass are the reflections of our world that have been altered to match that other dimension. It's unknown what caused these suspicions, or where they originated, or if there is even any truth to them. Believers of this particular version of the 'flash in the glass' saga tend to vanish from their places of warning after a while. It is unknown if these people go to a particular place together or if they simply move away and try to forget about it, but more often than not, they turn up again, dead. The cause of death is never the same and it is unknown who is targeting these particular people.'

Lovino went pale as a ghost. His brother always said that the other side of the mirror was a different world.

'If the mirror world of the flash-in-the-glass-people could be reached, the only likely entrance and exit would be through the glass itself. Through every mirror and reflection, every still birdbath and every windowpane, lies the mirror world. Our regular reflections are, theoretically, in the way of any attempted passage, though many have tried to get through. One theory tested in the mid twentieth century by the scientist Ivan Braginsky of Russia, who went missing during his research, was that shards of glass from mirrors could be used as portals to the other dimension if slipped through from the side. It is unknown whether or not these experiments ever found anything, as almost all of Braginsky's research vanished with him.'

"Ivan Braginsky... Why does that sound familiar?" Lovino muttered. Then it clicked. Natalya Arlovskaya, Ivan Braginsky's younger sister, had made their city her residence. She was in her late sixties, but perhaps she still knew something of Ivan's research.

Lovino shook his head and stood. He was being stupid. Feliciano was fine, nobody was going to just up and try to drag Feliciano through the mirror.

... Right?


	3. Stranger in the Mirror

Feliciano stared down his reflection in the mirror. He was glaring, really. It couldn't be him, staring back. It simply couldn't! Everything was all wrong, everything. This wasn't him, not at all. This was a stranger.

Feliciano's skin wasn't that tan. His eyes were amber colored, not magenta. Feli's hair wasn't quite that dark, nor was his smile that tantalizingly poisonous. Feliciano had round, pinkish cheeks, and his cheekbones weren't very prominent, but the man in the mirror was just the opposite. Feli tried hard to spot more differences. His gaze didn't pierce into one's soul, and his shoulders weren't quite that square. Even their clothes weren't the same! He took another glance at the stranger's face. Feliciano shuddered a little at the Cheshire grin his reflection wore, but the reflection didn't move.

Feliciano blinked. The reflection's eyes remained open. That was odd. Had he missed it? Feli tried blinking again. No, the stranger definitely wasn't blinking. If he stared hard enough, would the other man eventually blink or look away?

Apparently not. His eyes now burning, Feliciano scrambled to rub them and soothe the aching pain the attempted staring contest had caused. He definitely wasn't going to try that again. He needed his eyes good and ready to paint the next day!

Feliciano raised a hand. Oh, that one the reflection copied... Maybe he was just seeing things, like his brother always said. Lovino always told him that he was just imagining it, that he had an overactive imagination anyway and that he needed to stop reading so many scary fantasy stories.

With a soft sigh, the younger Italian brother placed the hand on the glass. The small plinking noise his fingertips made against the glass sent shivers down his spine. The stranger had done the same. Somehow, the mirror felt warm beneath his hand, like it was being heated from the other side... As if there really was a hand on the other side of the glass.

"You need a name." Feliciano whispered to the reflection. "I can't just keep calling you my reflection that doesn't match. I can't keep calling you the stranger in my mirror. I'll call you... I'll call you..." He began to wrack his brain for an idea for this stranger in the mirror's name.

He couldn't be Feliciano the Second, that implied they were related. The stranger couldn't be called Lovino like his brother. It couldn't be a Spanish name or a German one, either. Something Italian. Rovino? He was destroying Feliciano's life after all. It sounded too much like his brother's name, however, and Feli didn't want any awkward conversations about that. Perhaps starting with an 'L' might be good? What names started with 'L'? Lovino, Lucca, Lucas, Lyricio... That last one was silly, though Feliciano liked the noise the 'c' made in it. It was like his own name. What if the stranger's name was similar to Feliciano's? They were reflections if each other, after all. Perhaps...

"Luciano."


End file.
